Against Stalinism and fascism

1. The Popular Front has been one of the great dead ends of the socialist movement. Today, a terrible version of it has emerged in the NO2EU electoral front in the UK, an alliance of Stalinists and Stalinoid trade union hacks with the most reactionary Little Englanders, with a smattering of anorak left groupuscules to give it some hard left legitimacy. Reminiscent of some of the dangerous alliances created by the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s, when they allied with reactionary war-mongerers simply because they were anti-Nazi. Yourfriendinthenorth neatly analyzes No2Eu here.

I’m happy to see that Max Dunbar has now joined Anne Applebaum, William Grimes, Adam Kirsch and others in helpfully rubbishing Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke for being an ahistorical apologia for pacifism. Baker’s efforts at redeeming pacifism’s ill-deserved reputation in the context of the Second World War appear to follow exactly the same lines as Mark Kurlansky’s Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea, which I was happy to rubbish a while back.

George Orwell was there, of course, long before us, when he noticed that pacifism is “a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.” Will I still be able to refer approvingly to Orwell’s many expressions of contempt for the bourgeoisie if the Liberal Party proceeds with granting the CHRC its greater powers?

You have to read the whole post for that last sentence to make sense, so please do.

3. The pacifist tradition that Baker and Kurlansky inherit is not an ignoble tradition. In the UK, its home was, for many decades, the Independent Labour Party. I have a lot of respect for the ILP and its heritage. Ken Coates is the contemporary figure who probably most represents the political tradition of the ILP. Over the years I’ve been influenced considerably by Ken Coates, his humanist socialism, his advocacy for workers’ control, his sense of industrial democracy as an extension of the republican liberties fought for by the likes of Tom Paine. However, in his little magazine, The Spokesman, I have long noted an unpleasant drift towards sloppy conspirationist thought, anti-American hysteria, a “New World Order” mentality. Habibi at Harry’s Placenails this trend, and shows how it spills over into very unpleasant antisemitic territory.

After the fold: Historical Notes, From the Archive of Struggle, Book notes, Blog notes. (more…)

I’m writing to announce with delight that my book, which has been in the works for about 15 years, has just been released, and I received copies in the mail today. I’m so happy right now that I want to tell the world about it without delay. The book is:

Forty Years In The Struggle: The Memoirs of a Jewish Anarchist
by Chaim Leib Weinberg
Translated by Naomi Cohen
Edited and Annotated by Robert P. Helms
Published by Litwin Books (Duluth, Minnesota, 2009)
[Sponsored in part by Wooden Shoe Books]

Chaim Weinberg (1861-1939) was an anarchist of Philadelphia who wrote his memoirs in 1930. The book was published in Yiddish in 1952 and remained quite obscure ever since. Today old Chaim’s have been released from the chains of time, with his funny stories of his public speeches to working people, his grandfatherly way of remembering the distant past, his qualities and his forgivable flaws. Weinberg would arrive in an auditorium to give a speech to Jewish strikers, and the audience would giggle as he approached the podium, and the organizers would cringe –because the man was funny-looking. Then, as he began to speak, he would hold their hearts in the palm of his hand, giving them tears or wild laughter at will.

The only regret that I have regarding this book is that I did not dedicate it to my mentor and friend Paul Avrich (nor anyone), who passed away in 2006. Without Paul, none of these things could possibly have happened.

Arthur Bough of Boffy’s Blog publishes some long internal documents from the Workers Socialist League of 1984/5. For non-trainspotters, the background is that a couple of years earlier the International Communist League – of which Bough had been a member – and the Workers Socialist League of Alan Thornett had merged (under the WSL name), but would soon split again. The split was over the Falklands War: the ICL argue (rightly) for a plague on both the houses, while the WSL called for victory for Galtieri’s Argentine dictatorship. The ICL mutated via Socialist Organiser into the Alliance for Workers Liberty. Here are the texts:

The key argument, absolutely valid today, is that we should not talk about “oppressed nations” versus “imperialist nations”, but, rather, about exploited classes who can be oppressed by capitalists of all sorts of colours and creeds.

Speaker: Richard Gilman-Opalsky Saturday, July 27, 2019, 7:00 PM Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan, Studio 632B (Chicago) The capitalist reality of the so-called “communist” regimes of the twentieth century has been exposed. An international diversity of theory and history going back a hundred years tells us that communism was to be found in movements […] […]

Readers of Criticism &c. who have the opportunity to attend the 2018 Left Forum in New York (June 1-3) may be interested in the panel Hegelian-Marxism, Critical Theory and Marxist-Humanism: U.S. Origins and Development. The speakers are Russell Rockwell, author of Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic, Sarah Kleeb, and Kevin O’Brien. Time […]

October: the story of the Russian Revolution China Miéville Verso, 2017 An enormous amount of intellectual effort is necessary to unearth what significance, if any, the Russian revolutions of 1917 hold for us today. Before it is possible to do so, the mind must travel backwards from the integrated spectacle of Putin’s Russia to confront, […]

“He deported himself like an unappreciated genius, whom the world takes for a simpleton.”—Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Daniel De Leon translation) “Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes; but he can give to none without taking from the others.”—Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Daniel […]

The organized bloodshed in Europe entered a new phase in February as the battle of Verdun began on the morning of February 21. In the U.S., antipathy to the war continued to predominate, but President Wilson was well into a commitment to gradually prepare the country’s relatively small army and navy for entry into conflict. […]

The August 1915 cover of The Masses draws attention to the lynching of Leo Frank, which took place on August 17 in Marietta, Georgia. The drawing is by Robert Minor, later a major CP figure. Max Eastman, the magazine’s editor, was traveling in France and an account of a discussion on the war between him […]

History of the Surrealist Movement Gérard Durozoi University of Chicago Press, 2002 This massive work, originally published in France in 1997, is actually a history of surrealism as it manifested itself in the visual arts—painting, sculpture, and film. The movement’s core literary expression receives short shrift in the book’s 800-plus pages. The political b […]

Readers of Criticism &c. may find this panel at the upcoming Left Forum (New York City) of interest: Left Forum Panel: Deepening Technological Changes in the Workplace, Workers’ Organizing, and Marx’s Mature Critical Theory John Jay College 524 West 59th Street Room 127 Sunday May 31, 3:40pm – 05:40pm Karl Marx, in his works Grundrisse […]